Indeed, Austin, Trilogy

Though not a household name, Indeed is the world’s most-used jobs site, with 180m unique visitors a month from 50 countries, browsing 18m jobs. It pulls in job vacancies from all sorts of sources and presents them on a simple site with two search boxes: “what” (job) and “where”.

Hyams, an easy-going son of a Hollywood director, is an evangelist. “The company’s whole existence is to help people get jobs,” he says. “Having a job is one of the top things that matters to people, after their family and their health.” He says this often and emphatically enough to convince listeners he means it.

Hyams arrived in Austin, and at Trilogy, in 1996. I remember interviewing him at Trilogy, where he went on to do software development and development management.

Indeed has had roots in Austin for some time now, since at least 2008 when another friend, Doug Gray joined. It’s been fun to watch the site grow and become more and more useful to those hiring or looking for work. It’s also been fun to watch a core of Trilogy alumni over at Indeed apply a familiar playbook: build a great company around great people; build a great team by developing great people; find great people by building a recruiting machine.

We’d love to follow their playbook at BP3, but we’ll settle for a much smaller version, given our size!

So how has Indeed fared since selling to Recruit a few years ago?

The company was considering an IPO when Recruit snapped it up in September 2012, generating huge windfalls for Kahan and co-founder Paul Forster. The New York Times made a $100m profit on its investment.

Hyams, a shareholder at the time of the deal, is full of praise for Recruit, which has annual revenues of $12bn and employs 32,000 people across 162 subsidiaries: “It’s a 57-year-old company. They think about the long term, not the next quarter. They have been the greatest benevolent parent.”

Indeed has repaid its generosity, delivering revenues of $472m in the nine months to the end of 2015, up 83% year on year. About half the job searches are on mobile devices, a growing trend.

Not bad. Great news for Austin, for Indeed, and for some good friends over at Indeed!